Day: December 13, 2012

In the early evening of Dec. 8, 1941, immediately after the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, the American west coast, particularly northern California, degenerated into freak-out mode when radar pickets detected bogies heading east from about 100 miles out in the Pacific. Sirens from ferry boats and fire engines screamed, blackouts ensued, searchlights swept the night skies, and warplanes scrambled to confront the “invaders.” Radio stations in Los Angeles went off the air, and 3,000 people “rioting” in Seattle kicked in the windows of shop owners who’d failed to douse their commercial neon. Nerves were frayed again the next evening, more blackouts followed, and a number of residents reported seeing “flares” in the sky, although no one owned up to setting them off.

Two months before anti-aircraft fire opened up on this unknown intruder over Los Angeles, Californians were pitched into metro blackouts triggered by unidentified aerial intruders on Dec. 8, 1941/CREDIT: tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com

Brig. Gen. William Ryan of the 4th Interceptor Command told the Associated Press the intruders got away: “They weren’t army planes, they weren’t navy planes, and you can be sure they weren’t civilian planes.” Press accounts — which stated that anywhere from 30 to 60 enemy planes had buzzed the area — were often contradictory. One speculated Japanese naval planes were probing American air defenses, although the Imperial Fleet was still north of Hawaii, well beyond airborne striking range of the U.S. coast.

The incident was overshadowed by the hyperbolically titled “Battle of Los Angeles,” when U.S. shore batteries actually opened fire on unknown aircraft shadowing southern California in February 1942. That confrontation endures thanks to a photo of the target being lit up by searchlights. The 1941 incident was forgotten for 32 years, until the Government Printing Office published something called Army Air Forces In World War II. It included an official explanation of that obscure event, and attributed the confusion to “mechanical difficulties with the new radar equipment” and “inadequately trained personnel.”

More than 70 years later, a typical reaction to all this might be: So what, who cares? Well, there’s at least one guy who does — Daniel Ropkin of California — and Ropkin notes the 1983 publication provides no data to support the claim. Again: So what? Ropkin: It’s part of a bigger picture.

Ropkin runs a website called “Saturday Night Uforia: The Real Story Behind the Stories.” He mines ancient newspaper articles, magazines and government files for overlooked or buried gems from the “flying saucer” era, back when Uncle Sam held his nose and officially attempted to demystify The Great Taboo. This site is for hardcore UFO scholar/nerds because it showcases contemporaneous primary sources embroidered with contextual narrative, not opinion. But the site’s focus on perspective is also entertaining, because its documentation of science’s aversion to radical concepts sounds suspiciously modern. For instance, on July 2, 1947, a week or so before the Roswell controversy broke, during the first major UFO wave, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cited two astronomers who agreed that the “saucers were dreamed up by a hapless male involved in domestic difficulties and perhaps with one or two drinks under his belt.”

Ropkin posts a new installment once a week, every Saturday night. It’s chronology-driven, and his posts are so well organized, he’s got them completed and scheduled up through March 2013. It’s a labor-intensive craft that soaks up a couple of hours each weekday to post news from straight-up science and aeronautics. But you won’t find many UFO stories here, he emails De Void, “because there is precious little authentic news to be found these days.”

Ropkin declines to divulge his real job. But he says Saturday Night Uforia has no agenda, other than to present “an important part of American history which has been so long misrepresented and distorted that its true historical scope and effect has been almost totally obscured from view.”

Ropkin’s process reminds De Void of the year’s best related book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords and Robert Powell. Like that book, Saturday Night Uforia advances no position, other than to re-establish the fact that something very real and very weird is going on upstairs. And that although our institutions have failed in getting us the full story, a larger and more complex accounting is languishing in the dusty archives, in shards and fragments, from the days when taxpayer money was transparently budgeted for the pursuit of answers.

“I personally don’t care whether the ultimate ‘answer’ is ever found, and I’m certainly no proponent of any one theory,” Ropkin tells De Void. “It’s the real live human drama of it all which holds my fascination.”